Prologue

There is no sensation quite like sand slipping through your fingers.

Boulders, millennia old, worn down into a thousand thousand grains, sliding through your hands like water, like dust. Every grain has a story, trod upon by goat herders and spice traders, scholars and priests.

I don’t remember a time before the sand. Years after I left Cairo, I tried to reclaim the peace in beaches. Months on Santorini and Mykonos gave me nothing. I hid from the world behind the white domes of the church of Panagia Episkopi. I watched the daughters of fishermen with their eyes of driftwood and seaweed, laughing on the shores of Mykonos, feeding the famous pelican of Alefkantra, and I felt nothing but a longing for the blistering winds and the grit that never left my mouth.

There were two women, and neither of them were meant to be mine. Actaeon was torn to shreds for trespassing on a goddess. I didn’t fare much better.

They say time heals all wounds. It doesn’t. Some wounds can poison your blood and leave behind nothing but the memory of a man. That’s all I really am, a memory. I found myself in her arms, and when she was gone, I had nowhere else to look. I spent years losing myself in a thousand books, a hundred cities. I walked until my feet bled. I wanted to forgot my own name, but theirs never faded from my lips.

Most people have plans for their lives whether they realize it consciously or not. Everyone has things about their future that they accept as constants. Marriage, family, stable job. We just seem to expect them to fall into place around us. I know I didn’t expect my life to turn into what it has.

I’ve had more second chances than most. I’ve started over a dozen times, telling myself that this time will be different. This time I’ll be a person. I’ll settle down and stop running across the world. I’ll stop the endless searching, and I’ll stop hearing the endless tap tap tap of the typewriter that follows me in my sleep.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though.

I was born in England to a man lost in the past and a woman lost in him. My father was a scholar and an archaeologist, sifting through the sands and the ruins of the world’s great civilizations to free a shard of pottery. My earliest memories were at dig sites, watching from the sidelines as my father meticulously brushed the dust away from the object with a reverence any zealot would understand.

Finally unearthed, he would begin his narrative for my benefit, spinning tales of Etruscans and Greeks, Spartans and Romans, whichever long-dead civilization we were immersed in. The tales of heroes and battles enchanted my young mind. I learned of Hector and Achilles at his knee, staring in rapt attention at my father as he kept me occupied and kept my clumsy toddler fingers away from the priceless artifacts.

Somewhere in the background of those early days was my mother, golden-haired and with a fading smile stretched across her lips. As each year slipped away and I went from toddling across the sands to studying the books in my father’s collections, the smile grew fainter and fainter until it finally disappeared, taking her with it.

There was no argument, no adulterous affair. My home was not broken in that sense of the word. It seemed almost fitting when I look back all these years later. The dissolution of my parent’s love was just as it had been with a hundred long-dead civilizations. Instead of an eruption, their love simply crumbled slowly, brick by brick. Neither of them even noticed as the shifting sands buried it.

She simply walked away.

I never saw her again.

Looking back, I barely registered her absence. I was my father’s son, and I followed his footsteps out into the desert from the first moment I could stand. In the months after she left, my father’s pace grew frantic. We traveled constantly, and my father’s colleagues had long since stopped mentioning that “the boy should be in school.”

My father hired a tutor everywhere we stayed longer than a week, usually eagerly over-educated graduate students more than happy to drill me on calculus or botany or whichever subject my father thought I should be learning that month.

I was thirteen when my mother left, that awkward age where your teenaged mind convinces you that you’re an adult, and I had never known a life with a stable address. My father called us English, but I’d never spent more than a few weeks at a time in that grey, rainy country.

Something had changed, and I didn’t need life experience to know it. My father, a man who had spent days unearthing a mosaic with a miniscule paintbrush, lost the ability to sit still. We’d flit from one site to another, never pausing, and in the background, there was always the tap tap tap of the typewriter.

He never let me see the endless words that filled those pages. My father never seemed to sleep in those last months, fueled by black coffee and the never pausing frenetic energy of a man trying to cram a lifetime’s worth of knowledge into a few scant months.

I knew. We never talked about it. Never discussed what I was to do if he became too ill to continue on our quest, but I knew. I was young, but I was far from blind. My father generally treated me more as a colleague than a son, so this sudden urge to protect me surprised us both. He wanted the illusion, and that was the only thing I had to give him.

His sudden awareness of his mortality was written in every stroke of his pen and the endless tapping of typewriter keys.

Let me die here, they whispered.

The disease granted both of us a reprieve in the end. He did not fall into a coma. There was no frantic trip to the Cairo Hospital or months of convalescence. He simply slipped away during the night. I knew what had made my father the man he was had departed before I even opened my eyes that morning.

For the first time in nearly a year, the keyboard was still.

In the days that followed, as I was shuffled around by the well-meaning but socially stunted scholars my father worked with, I comforted myself with those pages. I sifted through the boxes with the same reverence my father used in a dig. I uncovered hundreds of pages, each sentence meticulously researched. The Funerary Rites of Nomadic Desert Tribes, Medical Practices of 3rd Century BCE Greece, forty-two pages about graffiti on the Colosseum. It was as though he had spent the year trying to outrun the disease that was slowly killing him. In the end, it caught him, and I was left with nothing more than a few boxes of scattered documents and journals.

They shipped me back to England, to grey skies and rain and boarding school. The professors didn’t know what to make of me back in those days. I was far from being the only quiet boy content to bury my nose in a book, but I was the only one who steadfastly refused to stay locked up in the dormitories and the classrooms.

I’d use any spare moment as an excuse to slip away from the crowds and din of my classmates. England was a far cry from the arid lands I’d spent my childhood exploring, but in the forest surrounding our school I found a crumbling stone wall. In actuality, it couldn’t have been more than a hundred years old, if that, but I let myself imagine it had been constructed a thousand years ago, Celtic tribesmen stacking the stones to protect themselves from the Roman invaders.

I whiled away many afternoons sitting on the damp ground by that wall. The stretch of days seemed endless at first. I kept my grades high and kept to myself, and somehow in between those rain-soaked days, I grew up.

When I had stepped through those heavy oak doors as a grief-stricken, culture-shocked boy, I wanted nothing more than to count down the days of my sentence in those dreary halls. Instead, as I grew up, I found myself caught in the same trappings of academia that had ensnared my father.

I studied endlessly and set myself towards finishing as many of my father’s papers as I was able. I even succeeded in getting a few published back in those days. They were heavy, scholarly journals that no one outside of academia would have heard of, let alone read.

I looked up from those pages, and I was an adult, packing the last four years of my life into a trunk and traveling to another stately marble hall in the same grey country, my adolescent desires of disappearing back into the sands forgotten, at least for a time.

It could have ended there. I could have done my four years in Oxford, collected a few graduate degrees, and ended up with a comfortable professorship. I could have looked fondly back at my youth wandering the world beside my father. I might have married a sensible British woman, an academic of course, perhaps a literature professor. I’d live out my days in a quiet house with a garden and tell my children stories of when their father ran around the pyramids as a boy.

That’s how it could have ended.

Instead, the wanderlust returned. Like an itch I could never quite reach, it gnawed at my senses. I shoved it into the back of my mind, locking it up like I was hiding a dirty secret in a cupboard. For four years of university and two years of graduate study, I turned myself into someone that sand-covered boy wouldn’t have recognized. With a first–class degree in my hand, I stared down at the potential 50 years of sameness, and something within me snapped.

I packed up my flat, shoving six years of post boarding school life into storage and stowing the few things that mattered into the worn suitcases that had once followed my father across the globe.

And I wandered. I was 23 years old, and I had no ties beyond a handful of friends back in England. I retraced the steps of my past, visiting the historic sites and tourist traps. I lost myself in women, staring into green eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes.

Above all, I let myself get lost in the world. On the streets of Cairo or the bazaars of Istanbul, I was just another nameless traveler, another face blending into the crowd. Bit by bit, the pieces of that small boy watching his father unearth fragments of history crumbled.

I wasn’t lost in the world. I was simply lost, but like any traveller navigating a new place, I didn’t notice that I had lost my path until all the familiar landmarks had disappeared from my sight. By that point, there was nowhere left to go but forward.

Chapter 1

Atlanta

“Where to this time, mate?” Edwin Pamphilos’ melodic accent, a strange mixture of British and Greek, echoes in my ear with the tinny quality transcontinental connections always have.

“America. Atlanta,” I reply. After what feels like a lifetime of crossing every ancient land I could buy a plane ticket to, I'm going somewhere truly foreign to me.

“You finally ran out of Old World, so you had to start on the New, eh?”

“It was time for-”

“-Another bloody change. I’ve heard it every few months for the last four years.”

Four years. In the course of history, four years is an eyeblink, but emperors have risen to power and fallen from favor in less time. Four years of non-stop travel replaced the wide-eyed nomad in me with a sharp-tongued cynic. I'm bored with the world at the ripe old age of 27, and I hate that fact about myself.

I hear rustling over the line and imagine Edwin rifling through the mounds of ungraded essays, photocopies, and assorted educational trappings that cover his desk. I chided him for his messiness at Oxford. A decade later, I've become him, at least in one respect.

“I take it from your lack of comment, the Ovid conference went well?” I say, segueing my friend into a more comfortable topic.

When Edwin continues, the glee pours from his voice. “As if a conference about the Old Man could be anything but! Harrison had a lovely little paper on Ovid in the 1990s, and of course, your contribution was very well received. Banquet of the Senses, indeed. No wonder all the women in the field seem to think you’re some ruddy rock star.”

“Hardly.”

Edwin snorts. “If you’d actually come to one of these conferences more often than once a decade, they might realize you’re - What was it you said to that hot little graduate student that was fawning all over you at the last time you graced Corpus Christi with your presence? ‘I’m just a guy.’”

“Keep your hands off those coeds or I might be forced to give Elene a call,” I said.

I feel Edwin’s shudder two thousand miles away. “Don’t even joke about that, Adam! You know how Greek women are. . . and Italian women, and Spanish women, and now American women.”

“Edwin, I have to go. I’ll give you a call later.”

He sighs, and when he speaks again, he can't keep the “disapproving older brother” tone from his voice. “Be sure that ‘later’ doesn’t end up being six months from now when you decide to move to Morocco or something. Be well, Adam.”

“And you.”

Atlanta is young.

After growing accustomed to cites over a millennia old, a city of less than two and a half centuries is a welcome change. The Antebellum houses that escaped Sherman’s wrath, along with the scores of replicas, captivate me almost as much as the temples of Greece and Rome had. I wander through the historic district of Peachtree Heights and end up shocking myself as I marvel at the architecture, having fallen to the pretensions of my profession too many times in the past. Neoclassical isn’t quite such an insult after all.

Unable to resist the comedic value of the Classics department of the University of Georgia existing on their Athens campus, I set off for the school. Like it or not, I'm an academic, and my first days in any city always begin with a visit to the local university. Stadium-sized lecture halls make slipping into a few classes unnoticed relatively simple. Whatever the topic, I find immeasurable comfort in these academic orations.

Typical of American academia, Park Hall is a stately brick building. Thick pillars stand like sentinels around the heavy wooden doors. Inside, it smells like every other academic building, old wood and the vaguely citrus scent of floor polish. Tucked in the free space in the English building, the Classics department almost seems to be an afterthought. Not many people are interested in losing themselves in dusty relics anymore. Pity.

“Are you looking for the Predecessors of the Parthenon lecture?”

I turn quickly to see a slender blonde in a pale green slip dress looking at me inquisitively.

“Yes,” I say quickly, my interest piqued. “Yes, I am, but I’m a bit lost.”

She smiles warmly. I've heard rumors of Southern gentility, but it still surprises me to see how unexaggerated they are. “Follow me,” she says. “I’m a bit early, but I wanted a good seat. These guest lectures always fill up fast.” She leads me into a large room with stadium seating, already half-filled with students, professors, and anyone with enough interest in classical architecture to give up a Thursday night.

She walks up to a cluster of professors and, in a matter of seconds, is engaged in an animated conversation with several of them. Sensing that she has all but forgotten about my presence, I take a seat near the front.

She hadn’t been joking about the popularity of the lecture. The hall fills quickly. The speaker is Manolis Korres, an expert of Greek architecture. I’ve seen him speak several times before, and I find my attention wandering to the woman in the green dress. The house lights lower as large images of the Parthenon appear on the overhead screen. The dim light obscures her features, and I wonder if her eyes are blue or green like her dress. She watches the lecture with rapt interest, barely blinking.

To be young. . . I doubt if she's even 23. She has the look of an enthusiastic grad student, the knowledge-hungry students that linger after the lectures, hoping a five-minute chat with the professor will unravel the reasons why they're spending their lives in the dust of parchment and marble.

Once upon a time, I was her. Ten years ago, I wanted nothing more than to understand the secrets of the past, to bury myself in the sand and ashes of the ruins. I didn’t want to hide back then. I wanted to know. I took far too many years before I realized that however magnificent the Valley of the Kings might be, it’s still a city of the dead.

I squint as the house lights suddenly blind me, and I applaud along with the crowd. She's smiling.

To be young.

It's over a week later when I see her again. I've rented a studio apartment downtown, and while unpacking the meager amount of boxes I bothered to have shipped from Barcelona, I realized that my pots and pans are still hanging above the stove in my old apartment off Carrer Del Taulat. Despite my nomadic lifestyle, I'm not a man who subsists on takeout curry and leftover Chinese.

Nothing quite illuminates any society as accurately as a trip to its version of the mall. Rome and Cairo have open-air markets and bazaars, and Atlanta has the Perimeter Mall, and I need cookware.

Tuesday afternoon and the mall is relatively empty. I skirt a pack of truant teenage girls and slip into the kitchen goods store. As I pass a shelf of baguette pans in search of a few simple skillets, I see her. She stands next to a display of electric mixers, her face buried in a French dessert cookbook and entirely oblivious to her surroundings. Clad in a pair of faded jeans and a red tank top, she looks even younger than she had at the lecture. I turn away, feeling strangely like an intruder.

“Can I help you?” she asks, raising her eyes from the full-page illustration of a chocolate mousse cake.

They're grey.

I smile sheepishly. “Sorry, but I didn’t think I should waste this opportunity again. You disappeared after the lecture before I had a chance to take you to dinner.”

Something about this woman intrigues me. Love at first sight is a convention made up to sell movie tickets to teenaged girls, but something about her makes me want to know more.

I’ve left a trail of pretty faces across the world, women who showed me that the delights I could find in the world aren’t just inside museums. I cherished my time with them, but there was never a doubt that our time had an expiration date.

She laughs, a bright open sound. “Cute.” A purple bag from a tea shop dangles from her wrist, and a few strands of pale hair escape the teeth of the plastic clip restraining her wavy hair. My eyes take in every detail like she's yet another artifact to catalog. “You weren’t really at Park Hall for the lecture, were you?”

I chuckle. “Not in the slightest, though if I had known about it, I would have been. Manolis is a great speaker,” I add. “I’m new in the city, and I wanted to see the school. The lecture was a welcome diversion from unpacking.”

She places the book back on the shelf and rummages through the small denim bag hanging from her shoulder. After a brief search, she pulls out a pen. She fishes the receipt from the tea shop bag and writes her number underneath the words “Casablanca Spice” in a tiny, precise hand. “I don’t know how interesting of a diversion I’ll be, but I’ll give it a try,” she says, handing the note to me. Almost as an afterthought, she adds, “I’m Lily.”

“Adam,” I answer.

I don't realize until I'm unlocking the door to my apartment an hour later that I forgot all about the pots.

Two days pass before I call her. I've never concerned myself with appearing over-eager and, despite my inexplicable fascination with Lily and her Southern charms, I'm in no hurry.

Unpacking has become a familiar ritual, comforting in the repetition. I can't recall the number of times I’ve packed and unpacked my life entire life in the past 27 years, but even when I lived in a tent at a dig site, my father was obsessive about making the wind-battered canvas that sheltered us feel like a home.

I hang the scant photographs I have of my parents with care on the stark white walls of my apartment. One is a grainy, out of focus shot of my father and his team unearthing one artifact or another.

Another is a black and white photo of both of my parents. My mother sits perched on my father’s lap, laughing as he whispers something in her ear. By the time I’d thought to wonder what he’d been saying to her, my father was long buried, and my mother was long gone.

The last photo has always been my favorite. Taken inside one of the endless canvas tents we lived in on site, I sit on my father’s lap. Chubby-cheeked with a gap-toothed grin, I can’t have been more than five years old. My father reads to me from a book in his hand while I stare at him with rapt attention.

I still remembered that day, even all these years later. My father had been reading a worn book of Greek and Roman myths, describing how baby Hercules strangled two snakes with his bare hands, utterly blowing my five-year-old mind. My mother picked up the camera and snapped the photo without either of us noticing.

In those early days before she grew sick of the constant travel across the dusty countryside, the three of us had been happy. Somehow, I feel her presence the most keenly in a photograph that shows no trace of her.

Shaking off my nostalgia before it has the chance to mature into a melancholy funk that will linger for days, I turn back the task of unpacking, lining the slim shelf with the books difficult enough to find or with enough sentimental value to make them worth the trans-continental shipping costs. I run my fingers along each book’s spine as I line them up like multi-colored soldiers waiting to be called to duty.

I could easily lose myself in those pages. I’ve fallen into that trap too many times. A title will catch my eye, beckoning me to flip through its pages and enticing me with scraps of memory. I’ll open it up, intending to skim a passage or two, nothing more. Then I’ll look up and two hours have passed. Evening will have fallen around me, and I'm left surrounded by a litter of half-unpacked boxes and a few pages of hastily scrawled notes on my next paper.

Instead, for once in my life, I put down the books and pick up the phone.